Archive for January, 2009

This Saturday is the first race of the 2009 Arizona Drag Racing Association season. There are a few things that I need to fix before then. First there is that slight oil dripping issue in the area of the oil filter angle adapter. When the engine is under load small drops of oil would drip out of the bolt of that adapter. Then there is a small issue with the breather hole gasket in the driver’s side header cover. That gasket is worn out and needs to be replaced. Another issue with the car is the "OFF" and "ON" lettering for the electrical kill switch mounted at the back of the car is faded and hard to read.

So, I ordered the appropriate parts from Summit Racing to fix all those issues.  I had them ship the parts overnight and they arrived on Wednesday.  I cleaned off the old lettering for the kill switch and put on a nice new sticker from Moroso.  Then I jacked the car up and went to work on replacing the oil filter angle adapter gaskets.

When I took off the oil filter angle adapter I wasn’t too surprised to find that out of the 3 gaskets that are supposed to be there, 2 were missing entirely.  Well, that certainly explained why oil was dripping out.  I ran to Home Depot to try and find a 1 3/16" socket to properly tighten that bolt back on.  The largest socket they had was 1".  So I went to Checker and jackpot – they had the socket I needed.  I put the 3 new gaskets on and tightened the bolt up.

I also replaced the worn breather hole gasket – that was the easiest thing to fix.  We will see on Saturday if the oil drip is fixed – but I’m 99% sure it is good now.  I sure am looking forward to the first race of the season, and to becoming a member of the ADRA, earning points all year long!

Some pictures:

What did you all do for New Year’s Day?

I went to Speedworld to do a little test and tune in preparation for the very first race of the ADRA 2009 season. I managed to get in 3 passes that day. For the third pass, I ran out of gas while waiting for my turn in the staging lanes. Whoops! I though I had plenty of gas, but it seems I miscalculated. Now I know to check the tank often. Heh.

Speedworld has a new timing system in place called Accutime. It is a lot more precise than the old system, because they added a 4th digit after the decimal. And, we now have 5 points of timing reference instead of 4, since they added ET and MPH at 1000 feet. But best of all, Speedworld will be broadcasting race results in real time over their WiFi system! So when they start doing that I will be bringing a laptop to races.

I wasn’t able to get the car to the correct temperature for any of my runs. I basically did all my runs cold. There is a nasty bog at launch, especially for the first pass. I suspect the engine is bogging because of the cold. I also discovered that my car is dripping a little bit of oil when I am doing my passes. The oil is coming from the oil filter angle adapter bolt. We will have to fix this before the ADRA race.

Here is a picture of the time slips for that day (I am car 03).

And here is a video of pass number 2. Keep an eye on the driver’s window of the other car. You’ll be amazed! Fortunately, the window did not hit my car! The other car was able to have it’s Lexan window rebuilt. Unfortunately, its transmission broke on the next pass.